It’s fitting that Georges Simenon, the Belgian-born crime writer who died 30 years ago, should have numbered among his ancestors a murderer who terrorized the good citizens of a small Dutch city 300 years ago. After all, Simenon was still in his 20s when he concocted his most famous character, a police inspector named Maigret, around whom scores of bodies would eventually pile up, and he did so while passing time in a Dutch town not far from the scene of his relative’s crime, a nicely tidy bit of happenstance.

Simenon worked and worked, fueled by a diet of red wine and pipe tobacco that would have done Jean-Paul Sartre proud, writing more than 200 novels under his own name and a couple of hundred more under pseudonyms, along with novellas, travel books, and memoirs. It’s said that he would disappear beneath the deck of a houseboat on the Seine that he sometimes used as an office and would emerge a couple of days later with a fresh book. His productivity was legendary, and in time he built a body of 75 novels around Maigret, the last of them published 41 years after the first. Maigret is doubtful, dour, and dutiful, mistrustful of all impressions and opinions and even of his own gut, and he much prefers to be out in the grime than occupied in bureaucratic detail: “Attending court had always been the most painful, most dismal part of his job,” writes Simenon, “and each time he felt the same dread.”

Simenon was busily writing when the Nazis arrived in France, and he reached enough of an accommodation—the details are murky—that he was able to keep on writing, even selling film rights to some of his books to German studios. Following World War II, he was consequently banned from publishing in France for a time, which occasioned his transplanting Maigret to the United States. Simenon traveled widely, then settled for a few years in Nogales, Arizona, just across the line from Mexico. Perhaps the best-known of his books from that time was a psychological portrait of two rancher brothers torn apart and brought back together by crime and punishment, Bottom of the Bottle, which became a very good if little-seen movie starring Joseph Cotten and Van Johnson. Simenon considered it one of his best romans durs, “hard novels” that weren’t necessarily mysteries.

But it’s his mysteries for which he remains known, and books like The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By, Maigret in Court, and Maigret at the Coroner’s are now considered classics of the crime genre. Even so, Georges Simenon didn’t have many literary heirs, though it’s possible to trace some lineage from Maigret to Wallander, Grjipstra, and Zen. But many of his mysteries remain in print, their look refreshed a few years ago, and New York Review has reissued such lesser-known but important books as Dirty Snow and Monsieur Monde Vanishes. If you haven’t caught the Simenon bug yet, then there are plenty of opportunities to do so—and who doesn’t need another guilty pleasure? Gregory McNamee is a contributing editor.